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Monday, May 30, 2011

Kues' Fatal Concessions

Author: Jonathan Harrison

In a recent article, Kues states that "carriers of epidemic diseases" constituted one of the "categories of Jews that the German authorities certainly did not want to have resettled in the east". Kues makes a fatal error in failing to realize how those categories were defined by the Nazis to be as wide and inclusive as possible. In his diary entry of 7th August, 1941, Goebbels had written:

The Jews have always been carriers of infectious diseases. They must either be cooped up in a ghetto and left to themselves, or liquidated (liquidieren); otherwise they will always infect the healthy population of the civilized nations.

By 27th March 1942, Goebbels had escalated this thinking:

It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.

Kues is therefore sliding down the slippery slope that must logically lead eventually to an acceptance that the Nazis abandoned resettlement partially because they regarded all Jews as carriers of disease, and eventually as an embodiment of disease itself.

Furthermore, this is not the only fatal concession that Kues' makes. He also backtracks on earlier claims. He had previously relied on a claim by Freiberg that he "had himself seen the SS distribute new clothing to presumed gas chamber victims." Kues chose to trust that claim even though he acknowledged:

Why would the Germans themselves bother to do such work? This remains puzzling.

Normally, Kues would reject a witness who presented such ambiguity. By page 80, footnote 171, of Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality [hereafter, Sobibor] however, Kues had changed his interpretation of Freiberg's testimony to mean that the clothes handed to the deportees were the deloused clothes of earlier deportees, not new clothing. Kues must therefore have realized that the Nazis would not have paid for new clothing for 1.9 million deportees, many of whom were non-productive (unable to work). This new claim seems, however, to have been dropped from Kues' most recent articles, because he now concedes that the Jews' belongings were "confiscated". This leaves him with nowhere to go, because he has already abandoned the "new clothes" gambit.

In reality, Kues' contortions simply expose the fact that 'confiscation' meant genocide: the Jews could not survive without clothes, and the Nazis were not going to pay for 1.9 million sets of new clothes/uniforms for Jews that were not productive. Moreover, expenditure on clothing and delousing would have contradicted the economic goals of the "confiscation" itself: Globocnik's final report for Aktion Reinhard [4024-PS] emphasized the importance of economics. Kues cannot run away from this report because it is cited on page 250 of Sobibor.*

This leads to a further nail in the resettlement coffin. Kues' latest articles were a failed attempt to show that delousing tasks were done by Jews. This contradicted Kues' earlier reliance on Freiberg (see above), whereby Kues had claimed that SS officers (not Jews) handed out clothes. More importantly, Kues' argument would make the policy economically irrational. Jewish labor would be being used to keep non-productive "useless eaters" alive. It would thus have been using Jewish labor counter-productively.

Kues tries to anticipate this objection by stating that "When slave labor is available in (virtually) unlimited amounts, efficient utilization of said manpower is not a pressing issue", but this ignores the fact that the food supply for the slave labor was extremely limited. The "pressing issue" is not numbers of workers but the food for those workers in a time of wartime scarcity. Kues reveals his socio-economic incompetence by failing to make this distinction.

Moreover, page 392 of Sobibor concedes that "alleged difficulties in providing sufficient food" may have been a motive for euthanasia killing in the camps. If this was so, then it logically follows that food supply could have motivated killing in far larger numbers. Indeed, it would make no sense to kill one set of unproductive Jews (mentally ill, diseased) whilst resettling other unproductive Jews, especially when there was already a procedure in place that could have been used to kill the latter.

In conclusion, therefore, the concessions made by Kues and his colleagues are taking them down the slippery slope that can only lead to a concession of an attempted complete extermination of non-working Jews.

*[However, MGK's citation of PS-4024 is dishonest: MGK claim it supports the case that non-Jewish Poles and Ukrainians were resettled, but Globus actually writes:

Again I request you to consider whether my former proposal to lodge the expelled Poles, and especially also the Ukrainians in the Eastern territories, especially the Ukraine, may not be feasible after all.